August 30, 2012

The athlete Oscar
Pistorius, by running in the Olympic 400 meter semi-final on prosthetic legs,
has blurred the boundaries between the Olympics and Paralympics.

In
Design Meets Disability, Graham Pullin advocates
blurring the boundaries between assistive technology and design in general,
allowing the worlds of disability and design to influence and even inspire each
other. If eyeglasses have been
transformed from medical necessity to fashion accessory, why can’t designers do
the same for hearing aids and prosthetic limbs?

One of the people Pullin
interviewed for the book was Aimee Mullins, another athlete who has competed on
the Össur carbon fiber blades that Pistorius wears. Aimee is also an actor, an activist and a
model, who has modeled for Alexander McQueen. She takes a broader, cultural perspective:

"[Mullins] thinks that fashion designers and jewelry designers
should be involved in design for disability as a matter of course.“Discreet?” she sniggers. “I want off-the-chart glamorous!” For her,
modern luxury is less about a desire for perfection as a desire for options.
Her wardrobe is made up not only of different clothes that can make her feel a
different way but also different legs: there are her carbon fiber running legs,
various silicone cosmetic prostheses, and a pair of intricately hand-carved
wooden legs."

Aimee Mullins's carved wooden legs

“I’m thinking about what I’m going to wear them with: jeans and
motorcycle boots, or my Azzedine Alaïa dress if I want to feel amazing.” Her
legs too can make her feel amazing in different ways: a pair of silicone legs
that are several inches longer than her own legs would be, make her (even)
taller and more elegant on the catwalk, while her eerie glass legs have an
element of magical realism... From the perspective of the health insurance
companies, Mullins says that “every single pair of my legs are considered
unnecessary.” But an element of fantasy among the practicalities of everyday
life is important to her. Even, as she wryly puts it, to express a certain
shallowness."

Informed and inspired by
the ideas of disabled people and designers, Design
Meets Disability ends with a series of speculations, pairing designers with
disability-related briefs. One such is a conversation with the designer Martin
Bone about prosthetic legs. Pullin
writes:

"We become intrigued by the idea of relinquishing visual imitation
without abandoning a reference to the feel of the human body. This implies
abstraction: materials that may not feel exactly like skin but that have some
of its qualities, or might be pleasant to touch in their own right. Bone is
inspired by the aesthetic relationship between the structure and cover of a
prosthesis, inspired to play with the contrast between hard and soft, skeleton
and tissue.

Martin Bone's
sketches for new combinations of materials in prosthetic legs

Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, standing by the Lunar Rover with the earth above; note that, as for all Apollo moon landing missions, the earth was in its first or last quarter as seen from the moon. Schmitt, a geologist, was the only nonmilitary astronaut to land on the surface of the moon.

Porcelain enamel station sign. Rector Street (R/W), 1970s. This is the only remaining sign in Standard Medium among a group of stations on the BMT Broadway and Fourth Avenue lines that were renovated with large colored tiles in the 1970s. Regarding the disappearing mosaics, a TA spokesman said at the time, “We didn’t consider these things had any great artistic merit anyhow.” (2008)

December 05, 2011

While it’s supposed to be unwise to judge a book by its cover, at The MIT Press, we believe that to acknowledge the visual and material appeal of books is not to diminish their content. In spirit of this belief, we're instituting "Monday Eye Candy" to celebrate the many MIT Press titles that we feel are beautiful, inside and out.

Today's eye candy is Kit White's101 Things to Learn in Art School. The cover is a stamped case and each of the lessons in the book is accompanied by a black and white drawing that illustrates the point made by referring to an historical or contemporary work of art. The drawings, produced by the author, act both as referrals to well-known works that students should study, as well as demonstrations of the difficulty of successfully capturing the subtleties of art works when copying them in order to decipher their secrets. Feast your eyes on these spreads from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

1) The first “signs” in the New York City subway system were created by Heins & La Farge, the architects of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), when the IRT, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT), and the Independent (IND) lines merged in 1904. They are the same mosaic tablets seen today in both serif and sans serif roman capitals. Although created in the same architect’s studio, none of the signs have a uniform lettering style.

2) George Salomon, frustrated by the labyrinth of distinctions among the IRT, BMT, and IND lines, suggested creating five color-coded lines identified by a letter and eleven branch lines a derivative letter/number combination. Only the color-coded route map was adopted by the Transit Authority, and Salomon’s subway map was published in 1958.

3) Many subway sign systems around the world experienced many issues with consistency of style, except for London. Calligrapher Edward Johnston created the Johnston Railway Sans font for Frank Pick, the publicity manager for London Transport in 1916. In the 1960s, the font Airport, first used in The Oceanic Building (now Terminal 3) at Heathrow Airport.

4) The font Helvetica, created in Switzerland, didn’t catch on so quickly in the United States until Mergenthaler Linotype in Brooklyn aligned its original German Linotype mats with American ones.

5) MIT was one of the earliest three places to incorporate Helvetica into award-winning designs and advertising.

6) Helvetica became the official typeface for the New York City subway system signage in December 1989. Forms of Helvetica Medium were used for the Metro-North, Long Island Railroad, and New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA).

7) Desktop publishing software helped prompt the complete switch from the font Standard to Helvetica. It was the only font available in the equipment and systems listed the 1989 MTA Sign Manual.